Authors to launch new books

Three UW–Madison authors are celebrating the planned early spring 2002 publication of new books from the UW Press.

John Diekelmann, Nancy Diekelmann and Robert Schuster will join with colleagues to “launch” the books at a reception Tuesday, June 26, 4 p.m at the J.F. Friedrick Center, 1950 Willow Drive, on the UW–Madison campus.

Nancy Diekelmann, Helen Denne Schulte Professor of Nursing, is editor of a new book series entitled “Interpretive Studies in Healthcare and the Human Sciences.”

A new venture for the UW Press and the School of Nursing, the Book Series reflects Diekelmann’s worldwide eminence in interpretive research, an emerging approach to gathering knowledge in health care.

Interpretive research seeks to complement scientific research by carefully examining the kind of knowledge that grows from the common experience of patients, caregivers and providers that is not adequately captured by conventional scientific methods. The first volume of the series, entitled “Power, Oppression and Violence in Healthcare,” includes interpretive studies with stories of both patients and health care professionals who speak to the problems that arise in health care systems that increasingly is driven by profits and often depersonalizing to patients.

Several authors in the first volume will be present at the reception to discuss their studies, which one reviewer describes as “listening to the voices of people who have been hurt or harmed by placing themselves and loved ones into contemporary health care systems.”

The goal of interpretive scholarship and the book series is to prompt honest conversations that will help identify and improve health care.

Schuster, Diekelmann’s colleague at the School of Nursing, is co-author with her husband, John Diekelmann, of “Natural Landscaping” (in its second edition).

The popular book focuses on plant communities and shows readers how to establish a natural ecosystem through thoughtful design and attunement to the natural world.

Schuster is director of the Simonds Center at the School of Nursing and has long been involved in restoration of natural plant communities. Diekelmann is an architect and a graduate landscape architect.